For a brief period of 12 hours, TikTok went dark in the United States.
The Supreme Court’s ultimatum had to come to fruition and the platform was inaccessible to US users.
If you clicked on the app, you were greeted with a message that said, “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now.”
We have never seen anything like this before. An app that was the world’s second-most popular in 2023 and the United States’ fifth-most popular last year, was shut down across an entire nation.
Careers have been made on TikTok. Creators who built audiences on the platform were faced with uncertain futures.
And its users were bereft too.
In 2024, US citizens watched an estimated 23 hours and 30 minutes of TikTok per month on average. Social media users in the United States spent approximately a third of their scrolling time on the app.
On Saturday evening, feeds were flooded with tearful farewells.
But it didn’t take long before it was resurrected. Pretty soon after it had shut down, users noticed it was back online, this time with a new message: “As a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the US!”
